I hope the flag was flying bravely today; I didn’t get to the Piazza to see. I took this on another brave day.
Every country has so many holidays, commemorating events and personages that matter mainly (or only) to them, that something as modest, as wholesome, as foursquare as a Flag Day gets lost in the scrum. But there are plenty of them, I discover.
Forty-six countries, of the 180 or 190 or 206 countries on earth at the moment, celebrate a day either named, or at least mentioned in some way, as Flag Day.
I just found out this very morning that today, January 7, is Flag Day in Italy. It commemorates January 7, 1797, the day on which the Cispadana Republic was established by Napoleon. It was a transitory entity, a puppet creature of the French government, but the flag that was created by representatives of the cities of Reggio Emilia, Bologna, Modena and Ferrara lives on in their choice of red, white and green.
The day is celebrated with varying degrees of pomp around the country. In Reggio and Bologna, it gets a lot of attention, because their city colors are red and white. (Green represents hope, if that needs explaining.)
In Venice, the day is kept extremely quiet; so quiet that no notice whatever is made on the daily calendar of the Comune. I only was alerted to the significance of January 7 by a temporary sign set up at Sant’ Elena, propped against the flagpole. At least somebody cares.
In Rome, more fuss is made of the date, as you might imagine. At 3:15 PM, in front of the Quirinale Palace (residence of the President of the Republic), a special ceremony of the changing of the guard is performed by the Corazzieri, the branch of the carabinieri designated as the President’s honor guard. They always look great, partly because of their size (minimum required height: 190 cm, or six feet, 2.8 inches), partly because of their horses, and especially because of their dress uniforms. Not everybody can rock a shiny metal breastplate and helmet crowned with a horse’s tail. Here’s the link: http://youtu.be/tfGCTVfNo8E
Note: If the marching in begins to pall, skip to 7:45 for the moment of the changing of the guard.
Lino, like everybody of his vintage, learned batches of patriotic songs when he was a lad. It was like us memorizing “Trees” for Arbor Day. The minute I started playing “La Bandiera Tricolore” he began singing along. It’s short, but sweet. It basically says that our flag has always been the most beautiful and it’s the only one we want, along with liberty. Long live the three colors.
Pig in glass: good. (Marchio Artistico Murano www.promovetro.com).Pig in crate, not so good. (Uncredited photo, Associazione Animali in Citta’ ONLUS www.aicve.it)
Seeing that by now I have drilled into everyone’s brain the fact that the Regata Storica is an event that has been held over the past several centuries, it’s fair to say that many of its attributes could be regarded as traditions.
Tradition, as I have drilled, etc., is a word intended to connote The Way We’ve Always Done It. But a closer look at many traditions demonstrates clearly, even to those in the back of the room, that they can be changed, eventually to become the new Old Traditions.
Take the pig.
For about the last hundred years, if not more, the traditional prize to the pair of men finishing fourth in the Regata Storica on the gondolinos was a live piglet. I have not yet begun the search for the reason for this, so just accept the fact that along with a blue pennant and some money, the pair got a young Sus scrofa domestica.
And they weren’t merely presented with the little swine at the end of the race. Before the race even formed up, the creature was put into a crate, placed on a boat, and exhibited up and down the Grand Canal.
By 2002 the animal rights organizations finally overcame this tradition, having claimed for years that the practice was cruel and inhumane. I saw the parade of the pig once, and it didn’t look so degrading to me. He was a lot more comfortable than anyone on the #1 vaporetto on a Sunday afternoon, and nobody in the animal rights organizations cares about them.
Returning to the subject of the fourth-place prize: Either people lived closer to the earth back then, 0r there were fewer scruples running around unsupervised, so a live pig seemed like a fine thing. The idea was not to divide it, like the baby brought before Solomon, but to send it to the country somewhere to be fattened and cossetted and tended until it was time for it to achieve its true destiny: Sausage. Soppressa. Pork chops, Pork roast, and so on.
There is a hoary old joke about this undertaking, which can be altered according to whichever town or place you want to insult. The person who told it to me was insulting Pellestrina, and it was made funnier by his imitation of the distinctive local accent. To Venetians, this way of speaking implies something rustic (to put it politely) and uncouth (to be frank). It implies individuals who would not consider pig-fattening to be anything out of the ordinary.
So: Two men from Pellestrina enter the Regata Storica, finish fourth, and get the pig. They are being interviewed by the national reporter, who asks them what they plan to do with it.
“I’m going to take it home,” says one.
“Take it home?” says the reporter. “Do you have a pigsty?”
“No.”
“So where will you keep it?”
“Oh, I’ll keep it in the kitchen,” the racer replies.
“The kitchen!” blurts the reporter. “But what about the smell?”
“Oh,” the racer says, “he’ll get used to it.”
Regata Storica, 2013: Andrea Bertoldini (left) and Martino Vianello pose with their pennants and their pigs. (Uncredited photo, www.regatastoricavenezia.it)
What would be a good substitute for a live pig? I hear you ask.
A pig made of Murano glass. And it doesn’t have to be fed or slaughtered, or shared out in perfectly equal halves, because they make two of them.
Now we come to the real point of the story. A few weeks ago, the very enterprising and high-spirited members of the Settimari rowing club decided to add something else to the prize line-up. They dispensed with the annoyance of raising and killing a pig, and got right to the point of it all, which in Venice translates as Food.
They planned a big dinner in their small clubhouse, invited Martino Vianello and Andrea Bertoldini, who had finished fourth this year, and uncrated two gigantic roasted whole pigs, ordered from somewhere in Umbria where the art of roasting pigs has reached the sublime.
If you’re a vegetarian and still reading (unlikely, I admit), you might want to stop now.
We spent several hours gorging on one, and the other was given to the pair, who didn’t anticipate any trouble at all in dividing and consuming it. Just like the old days, but better.
Because, as Andrea Bertoldini explained it to me, a live pig was really a problem. He’s been racing for at least 20 years, and has finished fourth in other editions of the Regata, so he has had first-hand experience of what being awarded a baby pig really means.
It’s not just taking care of it for months (you generally give it to somebody who’s already got the sties and the feed and the mud and all). It’s that you start to become attached to it, like Fern Arable; you feel sorry for it, and so everything gets derailed in the Natural Order of Things.
So Andrea was perfectly fine with dispensing with the tradition and moving on to something new, and easier to handle.
Better yet, he and Martino were each awarded a plaque which proclaimed them to be a “Principe del Porchetto” (Prince of Roast Pork). This was not only original, and cleverer than the old joke, but a play on the term “Re del Remo” (King of the Oar), which is given to the couple which wins the Regata Storica five years in a row.
Andrea and Martino have finished fourth in various years, but this the second year in a row they did it, and so the title of “prince” implied that if they were to come in fourth for the next three Regatas, they could be called King of Roast Pork.
Maybe you had to be there.
In any case, you’d have loved it. You never had to look into the creature’s soulful eyes, and you got as much as you wanted of the tender, herb-infused meat encased in dark greasy skin that was insanely crunchy. If you were to shut your mind about what you were eating, it wouldn’t have been because the animal inspired pity. It would be because you refused to think about what the food was going to do to your arteries.
If those two really do become Kings of Roast Pork, they’re going to have to spit-roast an entire herd of swine to supply the celebration. I’ve already got my plate and fork and cholesterol medicine ready.
Andrea Bertoldini (is he always on the left?) and Martino Vianello being feted at the Settemari porkfest, listening to the proclamations made by the Assessore for Sport, Roberto Panciera, (second from right) and club president, Massimo Rigo (far right).
This soft-spoken couple brought the massive quadrupeds from a company named Quartiglia. I’ve always been sorry that the roasting process makes the animal look like it’s smiling, but you can get past that if you love the meat.Show this to your arteries, then run.Just keep those plates coming.I’d send you the aroma if I could.Martino is enjoying this, along with everybody else. I didn’t ask him if this was better than winning the race because I know the answer. But it’s definitely not bad.
The house of Aldus Manutius in Venice appears to be inhabited, but we can only gaze upon the plaque and meditate on his brilliance from the street.“In this house that belonged to Aldus Pius Manutius the Aldine Academy gathered and from here the light of Greek letters returned to shine upon civilized peoples. The department of Greek letters of the University of Padua in the year 1876 1877 wished to designate this famous place to future generations.”
As all the world knows, Venice used to be one of the most important cities in Europe for printing — books, music, heretical works banned by the Catholic church. Even in the last century there were still 20 printing presses in Venice.
If one were to want to know more, it’s pretty much enough just to read the story of Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, in Italian), who singlehandedly midwifed the Renaissance by printing (and translating) many of the Greek classics which survived antiquity, few as they are. Do I exaggerate? It’s thanks to him we non-Greek-speaking people can read Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Demosthenes….
He also invented the pocket-sized book, and italic letters. You see how many things we take for granted?
But this is not a post about Aldus. It’s about Antonio Gardano and Johannes Buglhat and their big battle of the woodcuts.
They were part of the brigades of other excellent printers hard at work in the 15th and 16th centuries, and these printers were not all drinking buddies. Being merchants, they had to keep a sharp eye on their competitors. Sometimes very sharp eyes.
A friend has sent me an article by David Plylar, from the Library of Congress blog, which deals with the woodcut slanging between the aforementioned publishers.
Rather than reprint it here, the author has suggested that I only give the link. I myself think it’s pretty funny. But you decide.
Gardano’s printer’s mark featured the lion and bear of his patron, Leone Orsini.
Simple little gold, otherwise known as Au, or 79. I don’t know how much this is worth, but I know I could use most of it. So could Venice, but I”m not sharing. (Dallas Refining)
Money in Venetian is known as schei(“skay”). It is also known, by extension, as the thing we need most and have least. In fact, we have none. We never have any. There isn’t any. We can’t pay for anything because we haven’t got anything to use, not even bricks of salt or boxes of tulips. We’re broke, and proud of it.
I’m broke because no money comes in. The city is broke because money comes in but then it goes out again, somewhere, lots of somewheres, all according to accounting systems that bear more resemblance to Advanced Squad Leader than simple little double-entry bookkeeping, which was invented in Venice, by the way.
It’s something astonishing. Venice can’t pay for the Regata Storica. It can’t pay for the city hospital. It can’t pay for repairing (fill in name of favorite monument, church, work of art here). It can’t pay to build a new cinema for the Film Festival. It can’t pay to correct the errors which were paid for with money which it didn’t have. It’s trying to sell the Casino because the once-flourishing cash cow is running out of butterfat. Somebody wrote to the Gazzettino that the best way to settle the evergreen conflict about whether the Italian Region of Alto Adige is really the Austrian Region of South Tyrol is to sell it to the Austrians. Conflict over, coffers bursting.
The only way to confront snaggly streets and exhausted bridges and anything else that needs fixing is to seek a sponsor. The word “sponsor” has acquired the lonely, sacred, unattainable significance of “Holy Grail.” “We have to find a sponsor” is the most annoying, monotonous, “I got nothin'” phrase since “Have a nice day.” It means “We have to find an oil field,” “We have to find a rhodium mine,” “We have to find something that doesn’t cost us anything and gives us everything.”
But money there is, because it keeps popping up where it isn’t supposed to be — not only in Venice, but all over Italy. Bribes. Payoffs. Fake blind people imbibing state subsidies for disabilities. (A woman has just been nabbed for having requested — and received — a 300-euro contribution to pay for her children’s schoolbooks. She claimed to have only 6,000 euros in this world. But in fact, she turns out to have 480,000 euros in this world.) One man who has finally been cornered for some malfeasance I haven’t been tracking was discovered to have 238 bank accounts. Is that a lot? I have no way of knowing.
If it’s hard to earn gold to spend on cars and clothes, think of how hard it is to earn gold in Olympic medal form. This is from the Winter Olympics of Cortina d’Ampezzo, 1956.
I do know that there were long, convoluted negotiations between the city and Pierre Cardin about the “Palais Lumiere,” the cyclopean ultra-modern glass skyscraper he wanted to build on the edge of the lagoon. Everybody but the two aforementioned entities thought it was a terrible idea and finally he gave up and took his idea and went away. Which means that now the city suddenly doesn’t have the 30 million euros (I believe it was) which they had already happily scribbled onto the “Income” side of the ledger. Which means that now they haven’t got enough to pay for extending the tram across the bridge from Mestre to Piazzale Roma. Evidently the phrase “You should have thought of that sooner” applies to more situations than to five-year-olds in the back seat of the car who suddenly have to go to the bathroom.
As usual, everyone is wailing about taxes and many are wailing about the cost of government. (Feel free to wail in your own language.) But if anybody has the sensation that the taxes are going nowhere, it’s possible to discover at least some of the wheres. Such as running the government. We heard on the radio that the cost of government in Germany is 4 euros per person; in Greece it’s 6 euros per person; in Italy, it’s 27. It’s expensive to keep 630 people in Rome arguing all day about the other parties’ members and mistakes.
Am I going somewhere with all this? Certainly.
I am reading a very diverting book entitled “A Book of Scoundrels,” by Charles Whibley (1897), which delineates the careers of England’s most notable highwaymen and other sorts of thieves and criminals. Short version: In spite of their faults and failures as humans, he was basically on their side as long as they had panache, originality, and/or great clothes.
I offer the following segment in honor of all the fiscal frivolity that crowds the newspapers and the courts. This may be the only period that I’ve ever wished I were a lawyer; I’d be fixed for life.
And there was that little unpleasantness about the Golden Calf. Based, as I recall, more on its calfness than its goldenness. A detail, and not one that would get me out of jail. (The Nuremberg Chronicle, Vanderbilt University).
The characters: James Hind (1616 – 1652) a notorious highwayman of Royalist sympathies who happened to get his clutches on John Bradshaw, the judge who had condemned King Charles I to decapitation. The scene: The luxurious open spaces of Dorset, near Sherborne.
First, Hind took all of the judge’s money, told the bodyguard (who had judiciously decided to suspend his active service) to take off his hat, and then delivered the following discourse on gold:
“This is that incomparable medicament, which the republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster. It is truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit’s powder, but more effectual.
“The virtues of it are strange and various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out spots of the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap (sic) does common stains; it alters a man’s constitution in two or three days, more than the virtuoso’s transfusion of blood can do in seven years.
“‘Tis a great alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous principles of rebellion, and those that use them. It miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and makes traitors behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors.
“‘Tis a mighty cordial for a declining cause; it stifles faction or schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and brimstone.
” … The very colour of this precious balm is bright and dazzling. If it be properly applied to the fist, that is in a decent manner, and a competent dose, it infallibly performs all the cures which the evils of humanity crave.”
Thus having spoken, he killed the six horses of Bradshaw’s coach, and went contemptuously on his way.
Take that! And that! Hind’s scorn might be wasted on the prime exemplars of modern brigandage here in the cradle of the Renaissance. Not that they’re unfamiliar with scorn, and some irony manages to make itself heard from time to time, but discourses such as Hind’s would lack flourish in Italian, where utterances often depend more on blunt instruments (words such as “shame”) than the whetted poniards of true rhetoric.
But I feel better now. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it shows that there’s no point in struggling to be better people. It’s been this way forever. Here we are, and here we’ll stay. Evolution is over.
So let’s revert to mythology, when life was simpler, if shorter. Danae met Zeus in the form of a golden shower, the story goes. James Hind could only dream of this. The gold, I mean, not the girl. (Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1621, Cleveland Museum of Art).
